In Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, a frame doesn’t just exist. It feels like a painting that stood up, stretched, and walked onto the set.
I finished The Bear a few months ago, and I keep thinking about it in the most inconvenient places. It’s not a show that changes your life, but it does make you notice the chaos behind the craft and the obsession it takes to make something work.
Somewhere along the way, agencies decided that the more you suffer, the better the work. The late nights, the seventh round of “quick tweaks,” the group Slack chat that never sleeps, all of it celebrated like a badge of honor.
Every few years, designers panic like it’s the end of the world. People who think design means picking a PowerPoint template are writing think pieces about creativity’s demise. But the more I hear about the future of design, the more I think about its past.
It usually starts with silence. A designer hears the brief, nods, disappears, and reemerges four days later with something beautiful, emotional, cinematic, and completely wrong.
People don’t connect with brands because they follow a branding process™. No one falls in love with your award-winning framework, pixel-perfect layout, or round six of stakeholder-approved messaging.
The muse doesn’t wait by the phone. She’s not on standby for your 10 am brainstorm or your color-coded spreadsheet. She's a cruel mistress. She shows up when she wants, and only if you've been paying attention. Because inspiration doesn’t live in your calendar. It lives in your life.
We spend our days strategizing, designing, coding, and generally trying to look like we know what we’re talking about on video calls. But if you ask our families to describe what we do, you get answers that are brutally honest, only partially wrong, and way more interesting than our actual résumés.
I could say interning at FoxFuel has felt like a marathon, but honestly, that’s just because I’ve also been training for one. This summer has been a double feature: prepping for my longest race and diving headfirst into the world of design. Surprisingly, the overlap between the two isn’t as thin as I’d hoped.
Graduating from design school gives you the tools—but real-world success comes from the tricks you pick up after the tassel turn. After a decade in the creative field, I’m sharing a few practical tips I wish someone had handed me on day one (before I accidentally sent an attachment-less email to a client).